The growth in popularity of the Internet and other computer networks has fueled not only an increasing availability, but an increasing appetite among computer users for digital information. Users typically seek access to this information using an access device, such a computer, to communicate with an online information-retrieval system. The information-retrieval system typically includes a graphical user interface for entering and submitting requests for information, known as queries, to a remote search engine. The search engine identifies relevant information, typically in the form of electronic documents, and returns a results list to the user's access device.
One problem identified by the present inventors concerns operation of typical search engines, which require queries and documents to contain matching words. This is problematic for at least three reasons. First, search results may include documents that contain the query term but are irrelevant because the user intended a different sense (or meaning) of that query term that term matching fails to distinguish. This ultimately leaves the user to manually filter through irrelevant results in search for the most relevant documents.
Second, reliance on matching query terms to document terms can also result in search results that omit conceptually relevant documents because they do not contain the exact query terms entered by the user. Retrieving these relevant documents using a traditional search engine requires the user to appreciate the variability of word choices for a given concept and construct better queries. Alternatively, users may simply do without these valuable documents.
And third, traditional keyword search engines score and rank the relevance of documents based on the presence of query terms in those documents. This means that some documents with matching query terms and with non-matching but conceptually relevant terms may be ranked lower than desirable given their actual conceptual relevance to a given query. These erroneous lower rankings may force the user to wade through lesser relevant documents on the way to the more relevant documents or to overlook some of these documents completely.
Accordingly, the inventors have identified a need to further improve how information-retrieval systems process user queries.